ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud puts forward a new hypothesis according to which an individual's psychic functioning is governed by a more elementary conflict than the pleasure/unpleasure principle, namely, the fundamental conflict between a life drive and a death drive. In psychoanalysis, the simple fact of repetition is one of the means used by the mind to master situations that generate anxiety and to avoid them taking on a traumatic character. It is sometimes the case, however, that the process of elaboration in analysis fails, with the result that mere repetition becomes a much more serious compulsion to repeat which is liable to compromise therapeutic success. Germ-cells seem to escape this process and to oppose the movement of living substance towards death, but their immortality is purely illusory and "and may mean no more than a lengthening of the road that leads to death".
